ABSTRACT
With the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism in the 1970s, and the subsequent debates over devolution, it has become conventional to think of Britain (strictly the UK) as a multinational state, and a great deal of research has focused on differences between England, Wales and Scotland (see, for example, Taylor and Thomson, 1999). However, as Steed (1986, S92) has cogently argued, ‘There is much evidence that this trichotomous organization of the data and of research has simplified reality in a misleading way.’ In place of this trichotomous view, he has suggested an analysis based on the notions of core and periphery, with a more graduated set of distinctions within both core and periphery. Thus he distinguishes an inner core of London and the South East, an outer core of the Midlands, East Anglia and Wessex, an inner periphery of the North of England, Wales and the Southwest peninsula, and an outer periphery of Scotland, which ‘correspond reasonably well with arcs drawn around London at 80, 200 and 300 miles’ (Steed, 1986, S99). He suggests that there is a gradation in political attitudes and behaviour as we move from the inner core to the outer periphery, rather than a sharp contrast between England on the one hand and Scotland and Wales on the other. The aim of this article is to investigate these differences within England and to test how useful the concepts of core and periphery are in understanding regional variation in England.
